Dismounting a Datastore…

Just a quick one. Apparently a simple issue. I wanted to completely un-mount an iSCSI Datastore on just one ESXi host in a Cluster. In case you wonder why, the answer is “for testing purposes”.

The vSphere Client has an option to accomplish this task. Select the desired Datastore, right-click and select “Unmount” from the menu. After a few moments, the affected Datastores disappears from the overview. Now select the “Devices” view and you will notice that the device is still there. Select “Properties” and “Manage Paths..” and connections are still there.
I have tried quite a few things to completely remove all traces. Fortunately there is a simple solution. Just perform the following steps, you do not need to perform the unmount procedure.

The first step is to remove the ESXi host from the access list. This depends on the shared storage solution. In this example an Equallogic series. Select the Volume, go to the “Access” tab and remove the ESXi host from the list.

Figure 1- Access

Configure Dell MD3000i MPIO with Windows 2008 R2

Recently, I was working on a backup solution for a VMware vSphere environment. Veeam Backup and Replication was the software of choice. Veeam Backup and Replication is entirely based on disk-to-disk backup, but one of the customer requirements was to also have data on tape. For that reason, the backup server was a physical server, so it could be connected to a tape library.

The shared storage of the VMware cluster was based on iSCSI technology, in fact a couple of Dell PowerVault MD3000i boxes. In that case Veeam recommends for data retrieval the “Direct SAN access” mode. The operating system of the backup server is Microsoft Windows 2008 R2 Standard edition. The server has two NICs available for accessing the iSCSI storage.